“That’s gay” Part 1

Yesterday evening, Pinko Punko (of the fabulous Thee Bulls!) and I were engaged in a little witty repartee about my gay porn blogging and the link I had posted to The Onion’s editorial entitled “Why do all these homosexuals keep sucking my cock?”. He asked if I had ever heard a song by King Missile called “Gay, Not Gay”. Because I am tragically unhip and out of the loop where music is concerned, I fessed up that I had not, so Pinko kindly posted the lyrics. I will repost them here, because they’re funny as hell:

I saw an episode of the Jerry Springer show and the topic was “Tranvestites and the Men Who Love Them.” And the guy who was on with his “girlfriend” was saying “To me, this is a beautiful woman. She’s got a perfect body, beautiful blonde hair, everything. I love her, and I love making love to her. Now I ask you, does that make me gay?”Most of the audience thought so, and so did I, but it got me thinking about what is or isn’t gay.

Discussing sex with a guy is gay.Discussing sex with a woman is straight, even telling a woman “Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to suck a cock” is straight.Sports are gay, especially contact sports, unless you’re the only guy on both teams, in which case it is straight.Gyms are always gay, because afterwords, in the locker room, you’re showering with guys, and that is gay.Watching p*rnography alone is neutral, like eating a sandwich. It’s neither straight nor gay.Watching p*rnos with one or more other guys in the room, no matter how many other women are also in the room, is gay.Watching p*rn, even gay p*rn, with one or more women ONLY is straight.

Here’s an interesting one: kissing a gay guy on the cheek, or having him kiss YOU on the cheek is neutral, as long as the guy is out of the closet. Hugging and/or kissing a straight guy . . . is gay.See, look, I . . . I know I’m homophobic, but not about gay guys. They don’t bother me at all. It’s straight guys who don’t know they’re gay.They f**k my sh*t right up.Like a guy calls me up and says “A bunch of us guys are gonna sit around in our underwear and watch a football game and drink beer and eat chips, and, you know, maybe wrestle with each other a little, you know, just us guys! You wanna come over?”And I’m like “No.”

OK, you’ve got a guy sucking your dick, even if he’s dressed like a beautiful woman, even if he’s got the best breast implants you’ve ever seen, even if you’re saying “Suck it b*tch, I know you like it, you sl*t, you wh*re,” that’s gay.Adversely, if a woman straps on a dildo and you’re dressed like a woman and you’re suckin’ her cock and she’s sayin’ “You like it, don’t you, you like sucking my dick, you little f**king faggot” and she rolls you over and f**ks you in the ass and says “you love it, you little pussy boy, you love getting f**ked in the ass, I bet you wish I was a man, I bet you wish this was a cock, you f**king faggot” and you’re getting off on this like you’ve never gotten off before …that’s still straight.But then, when you go off to the bar, and you discuss this, or any other sexual experience with any other guys, that’s gay.

Here’s the most interesting one:Sucking a guy’s cock, can, under certain rare circumstances, be straight.Let’s say you’ve gotten into a betting game with a woman, and the bet is whoever loses has to be the other’s sex slave for the night, the kind of thing that happens in Penthouse Forum all the time, and you lose, and the woman makes you have sex with another guy, that’s not gay.

I don’t know exactly why, but it’s not.

Now, aside from being really funny, this is an interesting text because it manages to deploy “gay” in several (contradictory) ways. Here are four of the senses of “gay” that I see at play in these lyrics:

Now, at the end of each section, the song comes back around to the final meaning (homosexual)…except that each of the other meanings seem to float freely through the text, never allowing the final closure around the strict sense of “homosexual vs. heterosexual”. This is most glaringly evident at the end of the song, where the speaker explains how it’s possible to have homosexual sex without being “gay”…which obviously cannot strictly mean “homosexual”. The text doesn’t allow any of these senses of the world to come to rest and remain undisturbed.

Okay, so Pinko came up with a really fun game, called “gay/not-gay”, wherein we tried to extend the set of oppositions established by the song, while extending them far, far beyond genital acts or affectional tendencies. To whit:

“If you blog that is gay. If you blog anonymously that is gay. If you are an anonymous gay blogger out of the closet, that is straight, even if you blog about gay porn. I know, confusing. If you post at Three Bulls! you are straight, although you seem pretty gay. Especially when walking and talking at Trader Joe’s, discussing how awesome it is when the delicious juice of a crisp, ripe Asian pear dribbles down your chin and when you buy a mesh Hawaiian shirt in P-town where the vendor selling it to you says “When you go holey you never go back” and you say “I know!!!!”. I know. Super gay. Yet totally straight. This is the difference between posting and blogging. If you blog at Powerline, that is gay. When you use pseudonyms on your gay blog, that is straight, but when you use your real name because your pseudonym seems gay, that is gay, because you were straight before but now you are in the closet. Little Green Footballs seem gay, but are not. They reproduce asexually.”

“Sublaw. Point 1.
Giggling to yourself about future posts to your website. Straight, but not cool. Giggling to yourself while thinking about your blog. Gay, but not cool. Standing alone, muttering to yourself= Gay, in the asexual, not cool sense. Gay marriage=straight. Straight marriage=neutral, like eating a sandwich. Gay weddings= gay, but just barely. Straight weddings= super gay.”

“Admitting that you might be a little fruity = straight. Wondering why all these homosexuals keep sucking my cock = gay. Admitting a mancrush to one’s self = straight. Writing about it in a blog = totally gay.
(posting about it=straight, remember the fine line between posting and blogging- Pinko)”

“Working for a living is totally gay. 😐

Kvetching about work is totally STRAIGHT!!!”

We had lots of fun with this, but as you can see, the semantic ambiguity is getting more and more slippery. And I wasn’t the only one who noticed.